Canadian Mills Blamed for U.S. Mad Cow By IRA DREYFUSS
WASHINGTON (AP) - Canadian officials have traced to two
mills the feed that probably caused North America's two
cases of mad cow disease, one in Canada last May and the
other in the United States in December.
The feed from the Canadian mills could have contained
infectious protein from imported British cattle, said Dr.
George Luterbach, an official of a mad cow working group in
the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. He said Canadian law
prohibits disclosing the identity of the
mills.
Canada reported its only case of the brain-wasting disease
in an animal on a farm in Alberta. The United States
followed with an announcement that an animal in Mabton,
Wash., had mad cow. Both animals had been raised on farms in
Alberta. And both ate feed containing meat and bone meal
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``Our best hypothesis was the animals were exposed by
contaminated feed,'' Luterbach said. He said the two
infected animals did not eat feed from the same mill. In
both cases, the feed was given to the animals as calves just
before Canada and the United States banned the use of cattle
tissues in feed intended for cattle in 1997. Luterbach said
the feed could have contained tissue from infected cattle
imported from Britain before Canada banned the importation
of British cattle after a devastating outbreak of mad cow
disease there. Canadian investigators had performed mad cow
tests on all they could find of the 192 British animals
imported to Canada between 1980 and 1989, when Canada banned
such imports, Luterbach said. The investigators followed the
cattle until 1993, but could not find 68 animals that died
or were culled, he said. Protein from those animals could
have been processed into feed, he said. ``One or a small
number may have had BSE,'' Luterbach said. Mad cow is also
known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE. The feed
would have been shipped in large batches to individual farms
and consumed in about a week, and would not have been widely
distributed, he said.
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